November 4, 2005

Supported target platforms for VC2005 ?

After searching a while on the internet I couldn´t find any documentation about the supported target platforms for apps build with VC2005. Is there some kind of documentation about this? If you find one, please send me a comment!

Meanwhile I tried to run an app build with VC2005 on NT4. I created the template MFC-dialog application. Compiled the release version and put all required DLLs into the dir of the EXE (xcopy-deployment). Then I first tested it on XP-SP1 (without installed VC2005 and no SxS files for VC8): It runs perfectly.

Then I moved the app (and all DLLs) to NT4-SP6a and started it. But I got an error message that the function “GetLongPathNameW” could not be found in “kernel32.dll”. So it seems that NT4 is not supported because “MSVCR80.DLL” requires the above function (and MSVCR80.DLL is required by all other CRT/MFC DLLs).

Also there are some other DLLs which requires function which are also not available on NT4-SP6a: “SHLWAPI.DLL” (UrlUnescapeA) and “WININET.DLL” (FtpCommandA, HttpEndRequestA, HttpSendRequestA). Added: It is possible to get rid of this errors by installing the newest IE(5) on top of NT4; thanks to Andre!). But still the “GetLongPathNameW” error remains…

Of course, you can statically link your app to the CRT/MFC, then it might work (if the unknown functions are not used, because the intelligent linker throws the references to these functions away). The statically linked version of the MFC-Dialog-Template application is working on NT4-SP6a!

The only (indirect) documentation about “supported target platforms” I could find was in Deployment Examples and How to: Deploy using XCopy. And it seems that Windows 95 is a supported target platform! If this is true then an older OS can be targeted by VC2005 than newer one (NT4)... strange…

Is there some offical documentation about the supported target platforms?

Posted 2 years, 2 months ago on November 4, 2005The trackback url for this post is http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/bblog/trackback.php/53/